January 12, 2015

Even Idealism. Even Optimism. Even Buddhism. Let’s get past the lot of ‘em.

Any time our take on a belief system transcends the simple, present recognition of a common humanity to designate itself as an ‘-ism’, we have already blundered a long way down the wrong track. And any time we set a point of view in order to generalise it, rather than internalise it, we are doomed in terms of personal and social growth.

And on that note let’s also take time to recognise the evils of #Christianism too! Any time Big ‘C’ Christianity produces dogmatic views on gender, sexual identity or sexual practice it is, in effect #Christianism. And should be condemned.

The corollary though, is that abandoning ‘-isms’ presents an opportunity to set aside both our beliefs about the past and our binds to the future – in favour of behaviours in the present. In recognising the positive power of shared behaviours ‘-ities’ if you will: civility, clarity, charity, and yes, true (small c) christianity, we have a chance to build a mindful society, beyond the reach of individual minds.

My hope for 2015 is that we can talk down all these super-inflated, pretentious -isms, into simple and humble and respectful ‘-ities’. In doing so we must recognise and satirise all beliefs including our own – of whatever nature – to reveal them as the ephemeral and inherently ridiculous human constructions they are.

So down with relativism. But up with relativity; Down with liberalism, but up with liberality. Down with civilism, but up with civility.

My resolution for 2015 is to try and hold fast to a more mindful approach to these thought wars in general. To embrace the polity of the present. To abandon the politics of yesterday, and the politism of tomorrow.

Je suis, of course, but more importantly, tu es. At the end of the day nous sommes, tous, humains. We are, ultimately, just here to help each other to get through this shit, whatever it is

There are at least four fundamental axes of organisation: Production, Relationships, Communication and some kind of cr...

July 20, 2014

There are at least four fundamental axes of organisation: Production, Relationships, Communication and some kind of creative Entropy. There are probably many more, but these will do, to illustrate the point.

The state of any social system, envisioned on these axes, will obviously vary – from one extreme to another. The ‘scale’ of this variation will be the degree of sameness or homogeneity that is both assumed and desired by the would-be system ‘manager’…

So for example, if your belief as a manager is the left brain assumption that we are living in a mechanistic age, in which the outcomes of things may be largely predetermined, or are at least predetermin-able, you will tend to want to atomise the world you experience into small, homogeneous clumps, so it can be controlled, planned, predicted and managed within that planning framework.

In the forthcoming slides, produced with the thoughtful input of many named and accredited people, I will characterise this assumption of maximum, granular sameness as ‘Old World’ thinking – embodying the tacit assumption that the world is merely complicated. The consequence of this complicated thinking is to break down the world into its lowest common denominators – minimal addressable units of internally consistent demand, belief or behaviour.

For communicators, the assumption of a complicated world is that the greatest control can be administered by promoting consensus. As an old world power-wielder, I am likely to succumb to the urge to have people be ‘on message'; to be net promoters of my brand; to be consistent party voters. By being consistent, they become manageable and my brand equity grows.

As a marketing communications or product producer in a complicated system, I want predictable supply-chain sources and processes. I want the minimal possible amount of required tailoring and the maximum amount of fit to customers’ needs. Ford’s Model T, a can of coke or a mars bar would be good examples – where demand perfectly matches my constrained production boundaries.

In terms of relationships, I would ideally like to limit as far as possible the voting breadth and inter-action of my ‘constituents’, to minimise the confusion and disruption they may cause. I would like their inputs to be binary, their voice-outlets as few as possible, and their voting impacts constrained.

Finally in terms of entropy, an Old World manager’s aim is to create the maximum amount of predictability in the system; thus the capacity for change embodied in disorder (and especially unreversible processes) will want to be to minimise deviation not just in product, but also in process. This Old World, universalist and particularist scenario is summarised below.

It will doubtless be objected that nobody ‘seriously’ tries to manage a business at this level of ‘sameness’. This sort of mechanistic command and control ethos went out with the spinning jenny didn’t it? Or at least found it’s apogee in the car factory. This is anything but true – that behind the respective veils of soft ‘fat’ (rather than lean) trends like Engagement, Conversation, Inclusiveness and Relationship Management lies a defensive and consciously conservative planning ethos which still adopts an attitude of pseudo-scientific certainty and acts ‘as if’ human systems were indeed controllable.

A further objection to this model, even as an extreme picture, will be that it implies no competitive activity, or rather no change. And that in real life businesses and organisation work in a much more adaptive way. And indeed they do.

However, they do not wish to. The Old World logic of annual budgets, appraisal cycles and carefully calendared meeting-cycles accustoms technocratic managers to carefully co-ordinated showpieces in terms of their product launches and investment reports. Similarly, organisational charts, Enterprise Resource Planning and Business Information Systems for example, all strive to give an impression of control. The argument during the 1990s, and it’s a good one, was that short-term shareholder-oriented management was a bad thing and led to underinvestment in long-term resources and capabilities and erosion of long-term value. Certainly it corroded stakeholder value.

In parallel, but in the opposite direction ran the argument that management actually needed to be much more real time and more accountable to real-time challenges; that long wave-length management will always be too distanced and rigid to cope with the energetic bustle of market-led change.

The emergence of techniques like agile development and agile management exists as a counter to this fat, long-term ethos and prizes experimentation, short sprints, and rapid assimilation of input in an effort combine longstanding principles of just in time resource management, anihilation of deviations (from customer need in this instance) and assembly of minimal component of processes, alongside collaboration and meta-learning. Techniques like SCRUM and Kanban are now being widely adopted to make IT systems more adaptive at a micro level to real-world business need. The same mechanistically adaptive logic might well be thought to apply to social engagement writ large…

So to summarise all this – if the ‘old world’ can be stereotyped as ‘too’ atomistic, mechanistic, deterministic and many other ‘-ics’, as well as falsely homogeneous, what of the new world?

The New World, unsurprisingly, can be caricatured as heterogeneous. It’s just ‘turtles all the way down’ of course – but at least every one is different. The big difference in new world thinking is that instead of recognising fractal, and hence replicable and modellable patterns within the areas it wants to affect, the world behind to recognise error and miscopying as vital to change. The new world accepts multiple complex sub-systems – but accepts they are liable to error, spontaneous creativity and diversification.

While the old world describes man as master – the supreme engineer – the new world describes man as a fellow organism within a natural system, freer, within smaller scale systems, and able to leverage more group entropy and internal dissonance.

To turn to our 4 chosen dimensions, a new world view of value-creation would not be to create ‘universal product’, but at the extreme to create group-adapted product every time. These sorts of customised models already exist in abundance ‘out there’ in hyphenated world of tariff-tailoring, content-bundling, spotify-style mass individualisation and Amazon’s long-tail recruitment and specialist recommendation based on an emergent logic of contextual modelling and ‘in memory’ computing. The simple argument these technology solutions make is that the whole world is addressable in principle through social production and social delivery. There is a market for everything and a solution for everyone, if only you can make product addressable far enough along the ‘long-tail’ of need.

The same logic underpins the emergence of shared-value. To take a trivial instance, just because developing-world rural dwellers may not have the funds, storage or insfrastructure to buy a huge tube of toothpaste, they can still clean their teeth! Novel solutions can be created melding global resources and local solutions through pragmatic and simple solutions like more lasting brushes and smaller packaged pastes.

Similarly, the opposite to the quality control, deviation reduction and internal engagement obsessions that tried to drive Old World effort into everything to create consistency and stability, now find their opposites in a New World that acknowledges that the nature of the future itself is uncertain. Social, political, economic outcomes are planned by never delivered. And this is as it should be. Because something else, more interesting occurs instead.

Reality, and specifically the realpolitik of stakeholders’ needs always gets in the way. The macro-future – climate change, global recession, north-south power shifts, just as much as the micro politics of your payrise or who is buying the beers tonight come down to accidents of influence. The fact that plans never come true of course, doesn’t make planning pointless. Far from it – as long as that planning recognises its dependencies on networks beyond its immediate influence.

Rather than thinking of targeting constituents to elicit a ‘vote versus a no vote’ response or a ‘buy versus no-buy’ response, the new world paradigm observes the world as a spaghetti of only partly self-identifying communities. These allegiances may be temporary, as a ‘new parent’ or ‘NCT-er’ for example, or more lasting as an ‘environmentalist’ or ‘MacMillan supporter’, churchgoer’ or ‘muslim’ or a ‘woman’ or a ‘retired person’. The crucial insight in this new world is not that these social identifications offer fresh behavioural segmentation, but that they unlock new networks of loose ties that can be travelled as pathways by inspirational viral messages and behaviours. More importantly still, these connections may offer ‘sufficiently strong’ ties to bind groups to take action together. They thus form the organic scaffolding for new experiments in integrated social learning…

Finally, reviewing the axes of the New World, it’s worth noticing that the opposite of consensus is dissidence – the creation of contrarian or minority thought and action – the element that is the most vital ingredient in change. In this context, the mode of engagement is not persuasion, co-ercion or the three-line whip (in UK terms) but the simple recognition and re-assimilation of difference.

The goal here, in this emergent or possibly reemergent world is the transparent wielding of political intelligence – to surface, though sincerity and trustworthiness, areas of difference and allow what is expedient to proceed through common evaluation.

While old world consensus-building is a masking or spray-cover technique, political dissidence, or more accurately integrative dissidence is a weaving technique. It does not let go of difference. Indeed it needs it for colour, texture and interest. But it also understands how to connect those opinions and skills into a dynamic whole.

Of course in reality neither the banal, mechanistic conformities of the Old World, not the exhilarating, individualistic humanism of the New World actually exists. What prevails in reality is a constant ebb and flow between the two sets of assumptions: the two systems and mental models of power: competed and contested. Left and right brain, united. Biology and Physics. Artistry and rationalism.

In practice, between the individual and the organisation exist a series of diverse groups that form, dissolve and reform chaordically in endless formats. At any one time these groups – anything from a duo in a meeting room to a conference room full of people conducting open space workshops, all will be interrelating to each other, however weakly. These interactions and the way they are experienced is the stuff of life.

Within these ad hoc groups we are each of us engaged in an endless series of experiments to make change happen through influence, to learn about ourselves through assimilating the feedback and inspiration of others, and to change ourselves.

The challenge of the Real World is the familiar buddhist-style tension – either simply to accept the oscillation between institutional and individual ways of being (stability changing places with volatility; assimilation with projection etc) – or better still, to find ways to weave a more inclusive approach into our group relations: recognising that both giving and taking as both patterns of holding.

The systemic aim lies in recognising that individual identity contains both breathing in and breathing out, metaphorically.

We can think of this insight as a sort of social mindfulness – a sort of pragmatic version of the social imagination espoused by C. Wright Mills, and absolutely aligned with the group dynamics and situationalism of Mary Parker Follett.

In Follett’s own words, the challenge of this real world is “the integration of difference without annihilation or absorption.”

Our challenge, then, is to continually seek out and try new ways of relating that respond to this reality, and begin to turn a fractured web of organisational being into solid, secure pathways, which are commonly understood. They must be explicitly social. To become less abstract for a second, we need to explore new ways of relating which are not about pre-ordained power and control, but about instantaneous being and becoming. We need to experiment with ways of relating within organisational structures, which reflect and respect the dignity of the group, not just the individual.

This real world is not just a merger between the monochrome nature of the old engineering paradigm, and the vivid palette of the newer organic or biological one; it is just as importantly a collision between internal experience and external projection; between inner chaos and outer gloss – between surface appearance and deep structure.

The human condition remains a process of adapting and coping with change. We are creatures of flesh and feeling as much as thought and theology. The logic of the group remains a tension between mutual nurture and dominance.

Crucially, the things that might set us free from these limitations – grand alignments of vision, agreement on values; the zero-sum bargains of accommodated self-interest – all fall down in the face of a complete human being.

The reality is that these idealised ‘management’ conceptions of how we are supposed to be: visionary, fast, empowered etc, all describe stereotypes which in practice conceal a veneer of hesitancy and confusion. As work-life balance increasingly vanishes, and social media consume ever more of our waking time, the ability to maintain a veneer on ‘reality’ diminishes. New ways of relating are needed for a post-industrial age but our social function has not caught up with the new nature of work.

Organisations of all forms work well split into functions when they are populated by self-identifying ‘units of production’. But they work much less well when confronted by interdynamic questions of loyalty, love or leadership…

So we conclude that the new world munches the old, but does not digest it. Or perhaps the other way around. The old digests the new. In truth digestion is probably just a bad analogy here. What we have here is not consumption, not even dialectic clash, but a process of weaving. The old the warp, the new the weft. Most innovation appears merely as slubs of ideas, causing a little bulging of the fabric here and there and a little chafing, but never fundamentally altering colour or texture.

The innovation; the new ideas and inspirations are contained. There is no ‘paradigm shift’ from cotton to nylon, what happens instead is that variation is merely incorporated into ‘the tweed of life’.

An American poet once wrote beautifully about this:

Over-reading Whitman, just a little, we can perhaps interpret the ‘groups’ of Mary Parker Follett as the fabric of reality. If individuals provide the thread, it is groups that weave them together.

This is the central metaphor of ‘containing’, without contaminating or distorting. Whitman’s ‘large’ is an expression of scope, of scale, of imagination, ambition and range. Whitman, of course is talking about individual complexity – our ability to flip from role to role in an instant , to be obtuse as often as acute; closed as frequently as open.

But the middle lines of this extract are also enlightening. Who, he asks, will discard the trivia of his daily life? Who is tired of repetition? In those central lines, Whitman prepared us for an offer to those who stand ready at the exit door ready to depart. In management terms this can be read as a plea for readiness and responsiveness. As the market moves; as customers move; as colleagues move, are you ready?

It feels wrong in many ways to bastardise Whitman to the expediency of management thought. And yet when work occupies so much of life, maybe it’s inevitable that we should do so. The final stanza – “Who will walk with me” is a plea for diversity. It is an open invitation to humankind to take a step forward in self-discovery. I can’t think of a better encapsulation of the orientation to act. Carpe Diem.

With any luck you may by now be in agreement that something or other goes on in human society, in the interplay between the analytic-scientific and the creative-artistic worlds.

Attempts at scientific management are not misguided; they are suggestive of underlying structure. Their efforts to individuate and compartmentalise are vital to understanding. Meanwhile efforts at the rehumanisation of work, its socialisation, spiritualisation or systematisation are equally well-meaning. They tell us something of unpredictability, mutual dependence and humility.

The middle ground – the inclusive ‘large’ space of reality – reminds us that we ourselves are (for materialists) simply trillion-cell biological systems interacting with other systems. While we may strive for control of big things like outcomes, and spend our time articulating grand visions, the reality is that our efforts are far better focused at the level of interaction, and the nests of interaction we can construct through group work.

Our ambition should stop, I believe, at the level of principles, and aspirations rather than fall into the delusional realm of outcomes. But even so, we must know what we stand for. The following feel like a good start point:

How does this lack of large talent, large practice and large thinking affect organisations in practice? Predominantly at the level of collaboration and innovation, I suspect.

In organisations today, the management clichés still apply. It is much easier to say no, than yes. Most breakthroughs are attributable to the efforts of a few determined individuals, who often have to break the rules to make progress. Support functions like HR, Finance IT, Legal and even Communications spend vast amounts of time reducing risk, rather than creating opportunity.

Functional boundaries act primarily as a defence on unwanted contact and decision-making pressure. They act as coping mechanisms for collaborative pressure.

Large practices, by contrast, are designed to make groups based on talent, knowledge and shared ambition, rather than authority, resources or formal mandates. Large thinking privileges individual autonomy, but only in service to ‘the group’.

It rejects formal co-dependencies in favour of ball and socket thinking – holding one anothers’ needs in ways that allow full rotation. It prioritises actionable shared insights, and techniques rather than skills, per se. It favours attitude before aptitude, but sees both as necessary. It seeks out novel ways of breaking down organisational boundaries – challenging traditional Taylorite management practices, quality principles or ‘management by walking about’. Instead it favours management by walking with. This ethos offers a strong echo of Parker Follett’s identification of power in and power through others as a rejection of power over.

If a large learning lab were to be formed, it would seek to overcome the following sorts of social capability issues:

The question remains, then: how do we begin to equip organisations to exist ‘largely’ in the inclusive space between new and old? And how do we equip individuals to cope well and function effectively in this high contact, multi-role, porous boundaried, granular future…?

If this is a real issue – and rates of mental illness, job dissatisfaction and slow rates of large company job-growth suggest it is – then the solution must be many-fold.

Some crucial elements of a large approach are laid out in the slide below:

There are a number of imperatives underway here:

1. To establish large skills (or better put, ‘techniques’) as an accepted ‘way of understanding the world’ – and describe better what they stands for.

2. To build a network capable of creating an emergent portfolio of large skills – especially those which blend social, psychological and digital – through compilation and experimentation, and share those processes.

3. To recognise those techniques by direct viral propagation and by licensing to encourage ‘for-profit’ partners to participate in dissemination. In so doing, we will also need to reward those who use the techniques by recognition – both celebration and publicity, giving credit where credit is due.

And finally,

4. To recognise exemplary efforts and bring them to prominence in ways which inspire outlying groups and capabilities to develop further confidence.

5. To make use of the ‘celebrity’ of the emerging expert practitioners to encourage new adopters of large thinking to enrich its meaning, and thereby contribute to the growing diverse pool of knowledge.

The good news of course that many of the required tools are already in play today. From experimental theatre and improvisation to hosted social CRM platforms and MOOCs, many of the underlying principles of large thinking are already visible within organisations and society, as indeed they must be, being based on human instincts…

Mindfulness, for example, which started out as a process of spiritual reflection has been subsumed into the self-help movement, thence into therapeutic practice and now into as aspect of employee wellbeing and performance.

It can surely only be a matter of time until it is vacuumed up into group-level practice along with previous tools like Myers Briggs and Jungian archetypal analysis. Similarly Open Innovation – the recognition that innovation occurs not only in darkened IP-protected labs, but in collaborative fora, with customers and competitors at the table, for mutual benefit – is also well-attuned to large thinking.

Attitudes like inclusiveness, a focus on dynamics, and loose holding of relationships are all reflected in the its spirit of openness. Ubiquitous transformation – admittedly verbal stretch to produce the necessary acronym – just speaks to a relentless cauldron of change in organisations.

Much of this change may be superficial in practice, and purely confined to the surface. Nonetheless, it needs to be coped with. The march of new technology, the continual emergence of new businesses, the greater availability of knowledge and the unresponsiveness of traditional structures create continual collisions or roles and rules which produce frustration and anger if not surfaced and assimilated by large processes.

Shared value, as promulgated by Michael Porter, can be seen (at least) two ways: either as a means for large companies to colonise new markets with relevant products, or as a genuine attempt to co-innovate with emergent markets in mutual beneficial ways. Both are true. From different sides, these dynamics simply represent ways of integrating new world thinking into old world practices. The value-chain at the back of shared value thinking is a special case of group interdynamics.

Finally evidence-based strategy, exemplified by evidence-based medicine or evidence-based policy is a typical trend which exists in theory, if not in practiced towards an ever-emergent realism in decision-making. Evidence-based thinking is a hypothetical example of a self-correcting process. Similarly large thinking reflects an action-oriented, ever-ready process that ‘waits on the door slab’ and is ever prepared to self-scrutinise in a process of continual learning.

So what is to be done, then, to bring about large organisations and a large society? Certainly it is not a ‘Big Society’ in terms of assuming the burden of services. This is assuredly not about shrinking the public sector. Neither is it about outsourcing social functions to resource-deprived third sector organisations. Nor yet about empowering a capital-subsidised market to compete away regulated services. But is certainly does share the bottom-up, or middle-across processes of big society thinking, and it’s sense of empowerment. In the words of Will Bentinck, it is assuredly about creating ‘little princes’ who can humanely challenge the status quo and fondly reveal its lack of rootedness, while cultivating something better.

Large thinking is about the conduct of intentional social learning experiments which are digitally literate and radically inclusive – of disadvantaged, disenfranchised and simply dislocated groups.

Its intention is to help take to scale those approaches to individual and social learning which single actors alone cannot accomplish, by focusing on equipping both individuals and society to play a more contributory role in collaborative groups.

To that end a group of disparate individuals with a mixture of skill-sets from technology, social engagement, charities and commerce has come together to turn this simplified analysis of an ongoing human malaise into a practical vehicle for change.

Its mission can be encompassed simplistically, but hopefully in the slide below:

With apologies to @gapingvoid (Hugh Macleod) I described his latest venture as showing 'blatancy' on twitter. I meant ...

March 21, 2012

With apologies to @gapingvoid (Hugh Macleod) I described his latest venture as showing ‘blatancy’ on twitter. I meant it well*.

The first thing I meant is ‘authenticity’ – Everything he does is driven by exuberance for a belief system that he consistently advocates…

The second thing I meant is ‘simplicity’. Hugh has reduced the entire proposition down to an animated icon and a promise. As someone whose ‘business’ is words, crafting “Stories about Strategy” I am in awe of the suggestive power of images to cut across our reservations. Disagreements about words become a cause of demolition. Disagreements about images are an excuse for construction.

The third thing I meant is ‘directness’. There is a ‘buy my stuff’ abruptness to the execution which is disarming to a 19th Century Brit like me…

The fourth thing I meant is that there is an ‘aggression’ of conceptualisation. I have written elaborately in the past on memetic branding, along with Mike Cayley and also on brands as producers of connectivity. In Hugh’s mind brands simply become ‘Cannons’ puffing out memetic cannon balls… the visual language removes the need for analytical and captures the essence of the idea. More importantly, it is a productive, energetic and kinetic image, which makes brand owners feel as if they are in control.

Fifthly I was evoking ‘commitment’. Hugh’s basic concept here, as I see it, is to move away from a typical agency focus on the production process, and also to move away from a consultancy focus on outcomes. Instead he confidently assumes the outcomes and trusts his track record for the production process, and focuses instead on the ‘stuff’ itself.

Any traditional agency could think this strategic insight but none that I know would commit to the idea so far as to name the business after the process. They’d be too busy trying to define some much looser discriminator based on ‘modes of engagement’ – or just name it after the founder. Not Hugh.

So Blatancy rules. Underthink and Overcommit. This is the spirit of the age.

#SocialObjectFactory, is the ur-zeitgeist.

I’ll say it once more for effect: “Innovation is Simplification”.

*And on a related note, in my defence, I defer, once again, to Humpty Dumpty:

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master that’s all.”

March 18, 2012

In your new book, you suggest that many components of human nature are just too complicated to be really researchable.

Chomsky

That’s a pretty normal phenomenon. Take, say, physics, which restricts itself to extremely simple questions. If a molecule becomes too complex, they hand it over to the chemists. if it becomes too complex for them, they hand it over to the biologists. And if the system is too complex for them, they hand it to the psychologists…and so on until it ends up in the hands of historians or novelists. As you deal with more and more complex systems it becomes harder and harder to find deep and interesting properties.

The second snippet that struck me was a five page article, speculating on improvements to the Standard model of physics. Stringballs, Tetraquarks, Glueballs, Inflatons, Pomerons, Leptoquarks, Winos and Anyons are all speculated as additions to our basic model of Physics, which already explains – (drumroll) nothing. Even if the Higgs Boson is found and we finally understand why things we can see have weight; even is String theory is proved and we understand how weight leads to gravity; even if supersymmetry is proven and we understand where 80% of ‘other inert stuff’ comes from that doesn’t fit the model. Even if I could understand what any of this meant…

Back in 2008, Tim Wilson and I gave a presentation on the brand impact of Transparency in Amsterdam.
The presentation...

March 7, 2012

Back in 2008, Tim Wilson and I gave a presentation on the brand impact of Transparency in Amsterdam.

The presentation described a move from brand opacity (hiding knowledge to build brand premiums) through translucency (offering sneak peeks to support brand story telling), to fully-fledged transparency (a free and open information exchange with stakeholders).

Transparency is a founding principle of RightSideUp (RSU) thinking and the most critical enabler of social markets.

But actually the relationship between RSU and transparency goes even deeper. There’s a two-way relationship going on here.

Transparency is both enabled by VRM (which restores information and social symmetry between individuals and institutions) but it also drives the need for VRM, as any remaining asymmetries stand out like beacons of inequity, demanding ever more efficient matching services on behalf of the individual.

In principle, at least, this will create a virtuous circle of ever more transparent and trustworthy relationships.

Transparent individuals want transparent products which match their precise needs and social context.

But such richly transparent products can only be produced by transparent organisations which share their product backstory, seeking to combine both brand principles and supply-web production processes.

Inevitably though, transparent organisations’ self interest lies in creating transparent markets where their true stories can be selected over their rivals’ over-bundled half-truths and obfuscations.

Closing the systems loop, these transparent markets are the ones in which social and information democracy prevail – in which individuals are enabled to both share and benefit from their personal assets – the underlying principles of VRM.

RightSideUpness is thus embedded at the centre of the Transparency system and the Transparency system is, to my mind, an inevitability.

Make no mistake. Transparency is already here. We are seeing a proliferation of stakeholder to stakeholder, stakeholder to enterprise and enterprise-wide ‘mutual marketing’ tools to make it work for us not against us.

Back in 2008 I suggested the next decade will be a race between Microsoft/Google vs Oracle/SAP to provide the infrastructure for a see-through world.

I had not foreseen the exponential rise of Facebook. And more importantly I had not foreseen the open economy which is created by micro-applications operating to common interoperability protocols, with personal data-sharing at their heart.

In 2008 I suggested ‘Find’ would be the new killer app. This was a glib expression of a deeper truth, that merely identifying information would be trivial but that the productivity of insight is what drives progress. This is a function of the trust of social networks and of the decision flows they share.

From supply-chain cleansing to product innovation and customer mediation, all multi-stakeholder processes depend upon trust in the quality, integrity and linkage of decision-making. Shared, transparent decisionflow is the metaprocess that underpins mutual accountability.

Data and decisions; decisions and data. These are the building blocks of brand integrity.

Note to shareholders:
"In 2012 we hope not to shrink, by instinctively guessing what our customers want and gambling ...

Note to shareholders:

“In 2012 we hope not to shrink, by instinctively guessing what our customers want and gambling on a portfolio of more than 100 incremental improvement projects reflecting well-established management priorities. To support this diversified innovation strategy, we will invest in a variety of tools to generate unprecedented levels of data which we will store in secure organisational silos until such time as they may be useful. We will foster a climate of mutual consultation and multi-stakeholder project oversight without meddlesome intervention. In our ongoing quest for middle management accountability, we will ruthlessly scrutinise the business case for any substantive change and so avoid any unnecessary disruption to customers’ experience. To fuel this strategy we will cut unnecessary operational resources which may undermine trust by engaging in direct customer interaction. We will promote internal dialogue through the latest social media techniques to ensure that the whole organisation can engage in debating the future direction of the business, thus creating a collective accountability for the inexplicable inertia which has arisen as a result of the challenging economic environment.”

December 6, 2011

As in any maturing market, there is an ongoing tension between the heavy weight of the vertically integrated systems that kick-started this assurance infrastructure, and the paper-thin, but tightly laminated layers of process that now support it.

The many-celled structure that we have now is undoubtedly costly and cumbersome and may still not be delivering the assurance that’s required.

The Sustainability team does a good job of starting to unbundle both the functions and outcomes of assurance systems and so begins to reveal some of the inefficiencies, opacities and redundancies of so many overlapping schemes.

They don’t suggest that labels and certifications are to be made redundant, but they do imply that the provision of Credibility is an exercise in the gathering, auditing, assuring and communication of non-financial impact; and that each of these is a specialist task, susceptible to optimisation; and that all might be rebundled in new and more resilient ways.

We live in a fast-maturing market for Credibility, when values-based claims are increasingly susceptible to investigation. Any entity, or set of entities seeking to make judgemental claims of a product must assess its risk from two standpoints.

Firstly, what is the assurance-value inherent in that claim, compared to others’ claims? i.e. How much value are consumers investing in the claims being made?

Secondly, what is the scepticism-risk inherent within the trust network of that claim? i.e. How likely is it that a sceptical observer would find a claim dishonest, or disingenuous.

Where risk and value intersect, rational judgements can be made about the breadth and depth of the reassurance to be provided.

There is a third issue though, and one which goes to the heart of this dilemma. What is the social coherence of the claim? i.e. How resilient are the value-exchanges that support it? How incentivised are stakeholders to supply legal, decent, honest and truthful information? If power is distributed too much to the top or the bottom of the assurance system, or even captured by the middle, credibility will be imperilled.

There are major clues in this report that the way to unglue this matrix lies in interoperable assurance networks, which can overlay individual supply-chains, and that the credibility platform, and the reassurance processes that sit on that platform will need to become increasingly separate, and increasingly specialised, over time.

Brands are fighting hard for their Credibility. Certification systems will need to offer them ever stronger Reassurance.

In addition to Patagonia’s 4Rs – Reduce, Repair, Reuse, Recycle, I think its about time we introduced a new first R – Refuse.

We all have the will, but possibly not always the willpower, to refuse the efforts of marketers – including the iconic Patagonia – to persuade us to buy more stuff.

Just because an economy needs growth, does not mean that that growth must come at the expense of the earth.

If we are to be persuaded to pay good money for intangible benefits, then the less tangible, the less resource intensive and the less energy intensive these are, the better. Recycling is a safety net, Reuse is vital, Repair is good, Reduction is great; but Refusal is better. Reduction slows the cogs, but selective Refusal, is in the words of James Tobin – a little grit in the wheels of financial capitalism.

Refusal steals value from ‘the system of destruction’. It mutualises brand value. And this approach to stealing back value, this unconsumption, is well worth paying for…

If we can start to reward creation, not destruction we can find ways to pay for people not plunder.

By accurately and effectively valuing the life story of products, including their shared production and their common ownership, environmental capitalism can evolve into social capitalism. The pieces of the product we end up paying tomorrow will be the pieces we steal today.

The time we invest in care and repair, in creativity and choice-editing, in individualising and socialising our choices – this is the value we can steal back from the system. By adhering to the five Rs we create social value. These will be the unconsumptive values that brand owners will seek offer us back in the decades ahead. And they cost nothing. So steal with pride.

At a personal level, as someone with a fervid desire to change the world at every available opportunity, this resonates as an almost spiritual truism!

At a professional level, as I try to help The Chartered Institute for IT to catalyse a ‘metacluster’ of technology innovation capability across the UK, our success depends upon it.

Roland is right. We need new, more humanistic collaborative approaches which bridge the location-irrelevance of skills and the location-dependence of culture, heritage and social energy. When people meet, noticing can happen. Noticing is a precursor to lasting change.

I'm transitioning at the moment, from one dominant client - CropLife - to another - the Chartered Institute for IT. Th...

February 25, 2011

I’m transitioning at the moment, from one dominant client – CropLife – to another – the Chartered Institute for IT. This sort of change is (almost) always good, and (almost) always a source of new energy. It’s a chance to reflect on what else is changing in the world.

The future is already here, after all, but it’s just not evenly distributed.

My very strong view on the future, is that form of delivering stakeholder assurance – management consultants, ERP systems, standards bodies, and standards themselves will be replaced by a variety of new forms of DIY accountability. I’ll be focusing my future consulting efforts on helping organisations and industry to self-organise. To be more self-reliant. To replace narrow sustainability with a new collectivism of self-sufficiency and mutual self-help.

In the UK, Cameron’s Big Society is an exercise in shifting the public sector burden to the private and voluntary sectors. What this vision does not yet embrace, and must, is the renovation of the private sector itself as a mutualist undertaking. This is my ‘special project’.

As a first example, take a look at We are what we do. This is the future. It’s just #notevenlydistributed.

How many businesses will launch themselves in future via a facebook app' rather than a web-site?
If your goal is to ...

November 17, 2010

How many businesses will launch themselves in future via a facebook app’ rather than a web-site?

If your goal is to build a customer community, why bother with the interim step of a web-site to get between you and your customers?

This certainly seems to be the thinking of KAHRO diamonds, just launched at KAHRO Facebook. Luxury psychologist Dr Isaac Mostovicz is offering to help you choose the perfect diamond, based on his academic research into personality types.

Will the idea take off? Who knows! But it’s certainly a new disruptive take on business launches, and a great example of an emerging uncompany.

The next logical step will be to train customers to ‘self-diagnose’ and become a diamond-lovers’ self-help community…

Here's the thing.
Agriculture's share of development spend has collapsed from around 17% to just THREE per cent...in ...

April 24, 2009

Here’s the thing.

Agriculture’s share of development spend has collapsed from around 17% to just THREE per cent…in barely twenty years…

Now don’t get me wrong – urbanisation is a great idea. Instrumental in China; partially successful in Brasil; and collossally underexploited in India. But it isn’t the answer to sustainable prosperity and quality of life on a crowded planet.

We have to rewind a little. We have to maintain a pervasive and universal commitment to agriculture. We need, I think, a commitment to reruralisation – to knowledge-based agriculture!

Renewable energy may eventually fuel our cars (via fuel cells) but it will never feed the planet. But we have, as yet, no good alternative to our present unsustainable food sources. Our food supply is dangerously fragile.

IMHO, we must move beyond an expedient and exploitative ‘sustainability’ to genuine symbiosis. I’ve been a committed advocate of organic in the past. And I still see the ‘harmonious’ value of organic approaches.

Social, or systemic sustainability is perhaps more pressing now that environmental balancing…

We must fix both. But we need a much more solid evidence-base on which to make our decisions.

Above all, we need to produce a better system of accountability for sustainable development…